Brent Cobb Takes Aim at Bro-Country With ‘Yo Bro’ [LISTEN]

Brent Cobb's new anti-bro-country song may poke fun at mainstream country music, but there's no denying that the Auto-Tuned rap song still has a catchy melody.

In "Yo Bro," the singer asks one big question of the country music industry: "If I wrote a song about a dirt road I grew up on / Could I get it on the radio?" According to some industry execs, the answer to that question is "yes," but Cobb isn't having it.

"It was inspired by frustration," the singer-songwriter tells Rolling Stone Country. "I had a few folks in the industry say, 'Man, if you could just do something that was a little more mainstream, you'd really be doing well.' But just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. And just because you should do something doesn't mean you can.

""Yo Bro" sounds like bro-country and it looks like bro-country, but it's not," Cobb adds. "I'd say it's the anti-bro."

Cobb's experience with his own career has been frustrating, but he's also benefitted from bro-country's success: The songwriter co-wrote Luke Bryan's "Tailgate Blues," which has lyrics filled with country cliches, and has also penned songs for Little Big Town, Miranda Lambert, Kellie Pickler and Frankie Ballard.

Despite Cobb's success writing for mainstream country artists and his belief that things may have gone too far, he still thinks that music should come from what you know. For a lot of country singers and their fans, that means talking about dirt roads and pickup trucks, but Cobb thinks that they can still go a little bit deeper.

"We all grew up that way," Cobb says of mainstream country's current reigning subject matter, "but they know as well as I do that it's more sacred than that. It's about being thankful to live and see the next morning. You just gotta speak people's language, I guess."